Rebel Souls

by Justin Martin

  Ludlow downed a “bolus” every day for six months. “Life became with me one prolonged state of hasheesh exaltation,” he recalled. His grades suffered, and he was fined $1.12 one semester and $2.40 another for repeatedly missing morning-prayer recitations. (These were not small amounts considering that tuition was then $19 per semester.) Over time, Ludlow also began to have his share of bad experiences while on hashish. Once, he lay curled in his bed as a “hot and hissing whisper” repeatedly urged him, “Kill thyself!” Soon the command was taken up by an infernal chorus, and “unseen tongues syllabled it on all sides and in the air above me.” At times, Ludlow felt a piercing, near-cosmic sense of aloneness, as if he’d been banished by God—a terrifying perception for a preacher’s son: “Slowly thus does midnight close over the hasheesh-eater’s heaven.”

  Around the time Ludlow graduated from Union, he decided to quit hashish. But no sooner had he sworn off the drug than he began to pine for its effects. He missed the way that hashish animated the world around him. Sober existence was so blasé, “like a heavy tragedy seen for the fortieth time.” Ludlow added, “I tried in vain to detect in the landscape that ever-welling freshness of life which hasheesh unveils; trees were meaningless wood, the clouds a vapory sham. I thirsted for insight, adventure, strange surprises, and mystical discoveries.”

  Ludlow became a heavy tobacco smoker. He tried blowing bubbles and watching the play of rainbow colors over the soapy surface. Both activities proved a sorry substitute for a hashish reverie. Ludlow was so very alone in his experience, suffering from psychedelic drug withdrawal at a time when Sgt. Pepper, logically, could only be a military man, Timothy Leary an Irish gent, and the phrase turn on would have been gibberish—people didn’t even have electricity.

  At the suggestion of a doctor, as a kind of therapy, Ludlow decided to write his unique personal story. In four fevered months, Ludlow hammered out a 365-page manuscript, which he then submitted to Harper & Brothers, one of the most eminent publishers in the United States. They jumped on it, rushing into production with The Hasheesh Eater: Being Passages from the Life of a Pythagorean. (The subtitle derives from Ludlow’s pet theory that Pythagoras used hashish. Given the ancient Greek thinker’s outré ideas, he posited, how could it be otherwise? This is possibly the first instance of a speculative game that has occupied the drug cognoscenti ever since: To have such perceptions, Shakespeare, Da Vinci, Hieronymus Bosch—fill in the blank—simply must have gotten high.)

  Ludlow’s book was one of the publishing sensations of 1857. Sales were strong and, given the subject matter, the reception surprisingly positive. (He was denied entry into the snooty Century Club, but Pfaff’s was more his style anyway.) It helped that Ludlow opened his book with assurances that he had used hashish with the object of “research,” not “indulgence,” signaling that this was no callow tale glorifying drug use. Further, Ludlow’s narrative spent ample time on the dark side of hashish—graphically detailing some of his nightmare experiences—and concluded with his decision to quit using the drug.

  Predictably, many readers ignored Ludlow’s note of caution, taking away a different message: there’s a drug out there that promises a path to enlightenment. In fact, the publication of Ludlow’s book led to something of a fad for hashish. A reporter for the New York World ingested the drug and then wrote about his experiences, concluding, “For me, henceforth, Time is but a word.” As a student at Brown, John Hay—later Lincoln’s personal secretary and secretary of state under Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William McKinley—was also inspired to try the drug. “The Hasheesh Eater had recently appeared (1857),” a classmate reminisced, “and Johnny must needs experiment with hasheesh a little, and see if it was such a marvelous stimulant to the imagination as Fitzhugh Ludlow affirmed.” Hay himself would look back on Brown as a place “where I used to eat Hasheesh and dream dreams.”

  After getting to know Ludlow, several of the Pfaff’s set felt compelled to celebrate hashish, at least in their literary efforts. O’Brien worked the drug into one of his snap-and-its-done short stories, Aldrich wrote a poem called “Hascheesh,” and Whitman included allusions in some of his poetry from this time. Given his moderate drinking habits, Whitman in particular is unlikely to have indulged. Always ultrareceptive to societal trends, more likely Whitman used hashish imagery to reflect the current vogue for the drug.

  Despite the success of Ludlow’s book, he made very little money. The Hasheesh Eater went through three printings in rapid succession and sold about five thousand copies. By the terms of his contract, Ludlow earned roughly $500. On becoming a Pfaff’s fixture, he was a dirt-poor celebrity—a not-so-unusual combination in nineteenth-century America. At this time, he also got married.

  Ludlow’s wife was the former Rosalie Osborne. She was eighteen years old and stunning, with dark eyes and delicate features. Rosalie was the kind of woman men couldn’t tear their gaze from, lest they miss an instant of the ever-unfolding drama of her beauty. “Her form, the freshly blossomed woman,” is how Ludlow described his new bride, “her complexion, marble struck through with rose flush.”

  To others, however, Ludlow and Rosalie seemed almost comically mismatched. She was far too striking, the poet Aldrich’s wife noted, for such a bookish young man. It was an opinion widely and sniggeringly shared by the Pfaff’s set. On marrying Ludlow, the boy writing wonder, Rosalie seems to have expected that Manhattan would open up before her. For now, the couple was living in a run-down, $5-a-week rooming house on Clinton Street.

  Ludlow contributed short stories and criticism to various magazines, all the while casting about, hoping to find a worthy—and lucrative—follow-up to The Hasheesh Eater. The pressure of the New York literary game was immense. George Curtis, an editor at Harper’s, described Ludlow as “slight, bright-eyed, alert.” But there was also something subtly off in his manner. Years later, Curtis stated that he was also sure that he “recognized in the young man” a thirst for the “peculiar temptations for men of a certain temperament.”

  By the time he became a Pfaffian, Ludlow had succeeded in kicking hashish. For the rest of his life, he would resist the drug’s pull—or so he claimed. That may well be true. But what few people knew was that not long after he arrived in New York, Ludlow began to secretly dabble in a far more dangerous substance.

  Another member of the growing Bohemian set was Edwin Booth, a talented and troubled young actor. He didn’t necessarily hang out at Pfaff’s. But he moved in this same circle and became friends—in some cases very close friends—with Clapp, Aldrich, Winter, and others. During the autumn of 1858 he was living in New York City and in the midst of a colossal drinking binge.

  Booth, who turned twenty-five that November, had pale skin and long curly black hair. His eyes were his most striking feature: deep-brown irises and startlingly white whites, framed by thick, upturned lashes. These were arresting eyes, a shared trait of the Booth family, though Edwin’s seemed mostly filled with sorrow. People who knew him noticed that he never laughed—the closest he came was a wan smile and slight heaving of his chest.

  Booth was born in Maryland, a circumstance that would have a profound influence on the course of his life. Perhaps the only influence that loomed larger was his father, the legendary Junius Brutus Booth.

  The elder Booth, a short, bow-legged man with a booming voice, was considered one of America’s premier actors in the first part of the nineteenth century. During this rough-and-tumble theatrical era, actors toured relentlessly, playing makeshift theaters in tiny towns in front of audiences who might be sitting on wooden crates, crunching on peanuts, and hissing and whooping. To hold such crowds, Junius had perfected what’s known as the blood-and-thunder school of acting. He hammed outrageously, making incredibly broad gestures.

  For the duel scene in Richard III, his signature role, he’d often chase the actor playing his rival, Richmond, right off the stage and out into the street. Before death scenes,
Junius would hide a carmine-soaked sponge in his costume. At the critical moment, he’d slip the sponge into his mouth, bite down, and—red froth bubbling on his lips—flail and lurch, spasm and twitch, before finally lying still. Junius developed a reputation for utterly inhabiting his roles, and on good nights audiences found these performances electric. In his youth, Whitman saw Edwin’s father on such an occasion, and he never forgot it. “His genius was to me one of the grandest revelations of my life,” the poet would recall, “a lesson of artistic expression.”

  But there were many, many bad nights. Junius lived his life on a knife-edge between creativity and utter insanity. Drinking—something he did frequently and with gusto—served only to blur the line further. For inexplicable reasons, he once played the role of Julius Caesar entirely on his tiptoes. During a performance of Hamlet in Natchez, Mississippi, when the curtain rose for act 5, the crowd was treated to rooster-like crowing coming from the rafters above the stage. Someone had to climb a ladder and convince Junius to rejoin the production. The stories of his erratic behavior were legion, and he came to be known as “crazy Booth the mad tragedian.”

  Booth sired twelve children—seven survived to maturity. All but one of them lived in a shambling house on a large spread near Bel Air, Maryland. There was one child by a woman other than Edwin’s mother, whom Junius also helped support. A whole lot of people were dependent on the mad actor. When Edwin was thirteen, a fateful decision was made: he would accompany his father on the road, keeping him off drink and out of trouble. Edwin dropped out of school, intending to continue his studies on a piecemeal basis while traveling.

  Chaperoning his father turned out to be a full-time job, though. Edwin spent hours preparing Junius’s elaborate costumes and brushing his wigs. Whenever they’d check into an inn, there would be a constant stream of visitors, many of them enraged—Booth had failed to keep a commitment, say, or maybe he owed the aggrieved party money. Often, Junius hid under the bed, and young Edwin was left to make excuses. Following performances, Junius would be lit up, emotionally, and he’d demand that Edwin play a banjo to calm him so he could drift off to sleep.

  Other times, Junius would sneak out of the room, and it fell to Edwin to find him. Edwin knew that a late-night round of nearby taverns would likely turn up his father. On being confronted, however, Junius would really ham it up, making shooing motions with his hands, exchanging glances of puzzlement with the other patrons, pretending for all the world that Edwin was some irritating stranger, not his son. All this took a terrible toll. One of Junius’s fellow actors noted that teenage Edwin appeared neglected, exhausted, and filled with anxiety.

  Still, there was recompense for this lonely and itinerant life. By spending hours running lines with this father, by watching Junius’s every performance from the wings, Edwin received a crash education in acting. Soon he began to appear in plays alongside his father, doing smaller roles, such as Gratiano in the Merchant of Venice. By his late teens, Edwin had graduated to major roles. He’d seen these plays countless times; he knew all the lines by heart. Once, he was even a last-minute substitute in the demanding role of King Richard after ­ever-capricious Junius decided to take a nap right before showtime. Edwin pulled it off, and as the final curtain fell he was met with clamorous applause. The theatrical manager took him by the elbow and led him out to take another bow, announcing to the audience, “You see before you the worthy scion of a noble stock.”

  When Junius died, Edwin was ready to step in. The circumstances of his passing were fittingly bizarre: While chugging up the Mississippi aboard a steamboat, Junius grew thirsty and impulsively drank a glass of river water, something travelers were vigorously warned against. He became violently ill and died a few days later, on November 30, 1852, age fifty-six. Edwin was now nineteen. He set out on the theatrical circuit alone, playing many of the same houses that his father had. Comparisons between the two were only natural, and smart promotion to boot. A billboard in Chicago is typical: “Come see Edwin Booth, the world’s greatest actor, the inheritor of his father’s genius!”

  For Edwin, however, there would be no carmine-drenched fits. He relied on a new, more naturalistic acting style that was starting to come into fashion. In fact, he would grow to be one of the style’s leading lights. Edwin was well suited for a subtler kind of acting. His expressive face—the dark eyes against pale skin—could telegraph minute shifts of emotion, and he was especially good at rendering shades of pain and grief. His voice was soft, but commanding. Onstage, he relied on careful modulation and phrasing to make a scene come alive. Asked to compare his approach to his father’s, he once said, “I think I am a little quieter.”

  But in other ways, Edwin was very much Junius’s son. Early in his career, particularly, he had terrible problems with alcohol. “I was neglected in my childhood and thrown into all sorts of temptations and evil society,” Edwin would recall. “Before I was eighteen I was a drunkard, at twenty a libertine.” Like his father, Edwin was mesmerizing on a good night, mortifying on a bad one. A review from a Sacramento paper of an 1856 performance by Edwin in The Corsican Brothers includes the following: “Mr. Booth, who was cast to sustain the principal character, could hardly sustain himself, but he struggled through it, dragging everything down to the depths of disgust. Speaking mildly, he was intoxicated. . . . The audience was indeed small, but a few more such nights will cause it to be even smaller.”

  The year 1858 found Edwin living in New York City and drinking very hard. In fact, an entire slate of his scheduled performances had to be canceled. Edwin was still many years—and untold emotional distance—from the discipline that would ultimately lead him to be hailed as nineteenth-century America’s greatest tragedian.

  Among the Bohemian set, Booth became particularly close to Ludlow. Both were in their early twenties; both were considered prodigies. Each had been privy to adult-world decadence at a tender age, though Ludlow actively sought out drugs, where Booth had no say about being thrown into the company of reprobate actors. Ludlow called his friend a “splendid savage,” a reference to the fact that this Shakespearean actor had been raised under such deprivation. Booth admired Ludlow’s vast erudition (everyone did) and admitted, “I wish I could write as well as he.”

  Two of Edwin’s brothers also went into the family business, acting. As of the late 1850s, his older brother, Junius Jr., was out in California, managing a theater and taking roles in the productions it staged. John Wilkes was only just getting his career under way.

  John was five years younger than Edwin. Following their father’s death, he’d been left to run amuck on the Maryland homestead, pretty much raising himself in his own eccentric fashion. He became a devotee of Agesilaus, the ancient Spartan king, and took to sleeping on the floor on a painfully hard mattress. On the wall of his bedroom, he mounted a deer’s head, and from the antlers he hung swords and daggers, even a rusty blunderbuss. Sometimes, he’d set out on horseback, shouting heroic slogans into the empty woods, while carrying a lance, a gift to his late father from an old soldier who had fought in the Mexican-American War.

  Some of John’s strongest notions were formed by simple geography, by the fact that the Booths’ home was in Maryland. Even in the antebellum era, the state’s residents had varied allegiances—some identified with the Northern United States, others with the South. Deep divisions existed on the all-important issue of slavery. As a so-called border state, Maryland would ultimately play it both ways, never seceding, remaining in the Union throughout the Civil War, while maintaining the institution of slavery during the first years of the conflict. The Booth family was itself divided. While hardly an abolitionist, Junius had been opposed to slavery, and Edwin shared this view. But John—owing partly to the fact that he attended school with the sons of some plantation owners—grew deeply enamored of the idea of Southern aristocracy and was an avid defender of slavery.

  While Edwin tried to make it in New York, John was gett
ing his career started in Richmond, Virginia. He joined the Marshall Theatre company. As he told his sister, Asia Booth, he aimed to establish himself as a Southern actor, and she perceived that he “wanted to be loved of the Southern people above all things.” But on another occasion, he revealed what was perhaps his heart’s truest desire, his deepest calling: “I must have fame, fame!”

  John shared the Booth trait: those dark eyes. While Edwin was extremely charismatic, John was considered more handsome. He was also viewed as the inferior actor, with a style very different from Edwin’s. He was more of a classic scenery chewer. When John played Hamlet, it was duly noted, there was no subtlety, no sense of progression: the prince was a raving madman from the moment the curtain rose. Clara Morris, an actress who worked with both brothers, once offered this comparison: “There was that touch of—strangeness. In Edwin it was profound melancholy; in John it was an exaggeration of spirit—almost a wildness.”

  And so it was, that—on a whim—John abandoned his troupe at the Marshall Theatre in the middle of a run of Smike, a dramatization of the Dickens novel Nicholas Nickleby. The reason: he had just learned about the capture of John Brown. He took up with a militia that planned to guard Brown until he could be tried for treason and executed.